What amounted to a downtime of the site of about 20 minutes bore great fruits. The new database machine that Pair so generously provide to us is now in use. We are now on MySQL version 5. The new machine has lots more RAM than the old machine, so I expect the GMT 8:00 site slowdown due to the backups to be far less noticeable than it was in the previous years.

This migration was possible through the beta testing especially of ambrus who found the first two incompatible SQL statements, the scripts provided by tye for creating backups while the website is still in use, the moral support and patience of the site users when I tested the DB migration and made the site unusable/unavailable, and last but not least by Pair who donate the new hardware. I'd like to thank all of you and hope the new database makes the site faster.

If you notice any changes in site behaviour, please report them here or in the chatterbox. Preferrably accompany bug reports with a test script taken from Open beta test of the new database. The beta test didn't turn up any more inconsistencies between what MySQL 5 accepts as valid SQL, but there might be nodes that had been unchecked.

First of all, thanks a lot for all the effort taken to migrate the
PM-DB to the new machine.

I guess it is not a real bug, but I have observed a minor
change in the time stamp format of some of the XML generators
since about September, 27th, 17:35 GMT.
It seems that the time stamp format
of the lastedit attribute of the USERNODES->NODE
nodes from the User Nodes XML Ticker has changed from e.g.
20080102101112 to 2008-01-02 10:11:12.
An xmlstyle attribute was not provided when querying this node.

Since I couldn't compare the actual raw ticker output with some other raw output taken previously, the following statement should be taken with a pinch of salt:
No time stamp format changes found for nodes:

This change in the timestamp format would as well explain the "unread" mark on all wikis. I guess it comes from the different versions of DBD::mysql between the two machines. I don't know what other places are affected and whether one format makes sense over the other, so I can't promise a quick fix yet.